La produzione di contenuti di qualità in un’organizzazione on line per la gestione collettiva delle conoscenze: il caso it.wikipedia.org

The increasing growth of Wikipedia poses many questions about its organizational model and its development as a free-open knowledge repository. Yochai Benkler describes Wikipedia as a CBPP (commons-based peer production) system: a platform which enables users to easily generate knowledge contents and to manage them collaboratively and on free-voluntary basis. The quality of its output is one of the main concerns related to Wikipedia. How would a CBPP environment guarantee at the same time the openness of its organization and a good level of accreditation? Which aspects of the project have more influence on quality? The paper offers an overview of one of the best-known quality processes in it.wiki (Italian Wikipedia): the Vetrina section (Featured Articles). It also suggests an explanation to quality accreditation issue which questions Benkler’s hypothesis. Thanks to a qualitative analysis carried out through in-depth interviews to Wikipedia users and through a period of ethnographic observation, the paper outlines Vetrina’s organization and the social factors related to quality definition.